


true blue miracle

by deepbluetooth



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Apocalypse Prevented, F/F, Hearing-impaired Character, Original Character(s), Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Singapore, Strangers to Lovers, Updates at least once a week, Water, Zoo, ie i need to get into more fandoms, not a furry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-07-25 02:12:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16187945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepbluetooth/pseuds/deepbluetooth
Summary: “I wonder how you lose such a big cat."Singapore's pretty small, so everything that transpires makes a big enough ripple. One could believe the following events to be a microcosms of these old giants - gravity, space, seasons; and then there's the tide under it all, which is slow and inexorable enough to bring it all back.So this is a story about going home, maybe, home on an island washing away to the sea.





	1. an overture to start it right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's an unbelievable day.

Nothing much begins on a Tuesday.

 

Which means that somewhere between sweeping everything into her bag and emptying it back out on a navy school-issue desk, Jin thinks she’s got it pretty okay.

 

It’s not a bad-looking okay, really. The pretty lies in the fact that there are a sacred hundred and thirty-five minutes in a day where she doesn’t want to hurl herself into the South China Sea, and fifteen of them look like fawn-pink cumulonimbus clouds.

 

Jin’s always hoping for a good ending. The inference here is that she never gets it, and she looks forward to the one day she falls asleep past the horizon and no one will wake her up.

 

But the Law Of Tuesdays dictates an unpredictably, unbelievably dull day, so she takes it in her stride that she nearly made it to the end of the map before waking up. She’d give anything to vanish off the coast, so hitching a ride in her mother’s Honda because she woke up late is a small price to pay, even if she must tuck herself under the front passenger wing like the bad secret she’d only ever heard rumours of, leaking in from under the bedroom door.

 

The missing animal report comes on a Tuesday because nothing important happens on Tuesdays.

 

The radio belts out another forgettable jingle and Jin mistakes that for the day’s most important piece of news. It’s an understandable mistake when her head looks like the bottom of the sky.

 

Still, she pushes her way to the surface in time to hear: “―in live from the Singapore Zoo, there are reports of a missing animal from one of the enclosures.”

 

“Yes, yes, you see, I woke up this morning and went to work, right? When I got here, I thought the lion enclosure looked kind of empty but I couldn’t really put a finger on it, so I called the other keepers, then I got incoming that the tiger gate was open and there were tracks all around.”

 

“I see… so which animal escaped?”

 

Apricot sunflowers tangle up the windows of the grey car. The public is not in immediate danger, promises all the flowers, all at once. All they have to do is call ACRES if they see cat tracks larger than usual, and the Zoo hopes to see them anyway at the Safaris.

 

“I wonder how you lose such a big cat,” her mother asks nobody.

 

Jin is well-versed in how carefully her mother puts people to the wall with just words, just labels. In her mind, her mother could fit in at a museum and document pinup butterflies all day. She tries not to think about how this means her mother is a history kind of person.

 

This is an intrusive thought in her fifteen minutes of skylight. Jin carefully unsticks the thumbtack, holding her heart together with one hand as she aims with the other. “That’s not it. The spokesperson doesn’t even know which one of the cats it is. Or if it’s just one of them. Aren’t there records? Don’t you think someone up there should keep count?”

 

“No, but I’m sure the zookeepers are all so busy.”

 

Her day was pretty okay, but it follows the Law Of Tuesdays, so it’s more like pretty typical. This doesn’t have to mean Jin’s disappointed, she just didn’t see it coming. Being surprised means guards down, so she puts them back up. “Busy like you’re busy with your church stuff or busy like SMRT staff?”

 

Then there’s real radio silence.

 

“Have a good day,” her mother finally says as the 15ᵗʰ minute flees at the school gate, sounding further away already, so the typhoon warning bells are already sniffing the air in interest because Jin’s read somewhere that the further away a supernatural being sounds, the closer it is.

 

She grabs the case from the boot and shuts the back. As her hearing aid re-aligns with steadier poles, the tail-end of her mother’s long hair loosens into dark, tattered sails.

 

**

 

School is unbelievably dull, so Jin goes on autoplay right under the noses of teachers who transit between each reiteration of the syllabus like it’s nothing more than changing from train to train. Or maybe it’s train to bus now, because all over Singapore locomotives are breaking down in the middle of the tracks like they have the right to retire.

 

Jin would like to tell them that education is lifelong, so they have it easy; but she also gets that all products of Singapore have it too well not to say otherwise. So she lets them deconstruct themselves. Her reasoning goes like this; the retirement age is going up, so the inevitable slowing down might as well start early.

 

Anyway, Jin goes on autoplay. As in, she literally goes on autoplay, because her hearing aid is connected to her phone, which is still switched on in her locker, and because she forgot to switch to another playlist, it plays music usually reserved for midnight philosophising, or attempting cubic graphs. She doesn’t touch her phone much but she remembers glueing this track together. She called it ‘whales @ midnight’ because it had that peculiar effect of making people around the listener untouchably, unbearably beautiful.

 

This doesn’t change much. It just means that the girl sitting one desk down in math, who blinks like she’s revising how to look straight into dawn without rising with the sun and Definitely Not Cubic Graphs, now falls asleep with a web of silvery borealis, like an oil spill, caught in her eyelashes. If it were midnight, Jin would call her achingly beautiful, like all marine beings are.

 

Jin’s lungs spasm and seize, which means she is either a chainsmoker, or a fish in a tree. Either way, she’s out of her depth, even if she tries diving headfirst into her desk every day.

 

Even so, she knows feelings interrupt the autoplay. No one can give her answers, herself least of all. Jin goes back to the music.

 

Everyone believes they are going to a better place, but that’s because they don’t believe it’s dull.

 

**

 

Jin declares it the end of school when a passing leaf shimmies in from the window and makes its leisurely way over to smack her in the face. In the time she takes to peel it off, the chairs and tables reverse positions, everyone drifts away through the walls, but her bag doesn’t pack itself so she does that alone.

 

**

 

Jin’s school shoes are anything but white by the time she reaches the music room across the field, which is a disappointment, but not a surprise. It’s September, which heralds the monsoon season, or something. Jin prefers history to geography, but that’s probably because she’s still trying to find an era where she had a chance at being an honourable daughter, or friend, or somebody. Never mind she shouldn’t be able to look at girls. Everyone looks, it’s just how much they say about it.

 

Still, Jin says “stop it” to the wind as it threatens her back, which does nothing because no one’s listening, which is a revelation she mouths in sore victory like every time she wins a theological debate in any way but shouting the straw house down. Her messy excuse for a ponytail makes a two-cent threat to find its own freedom if she doesn’t pin it tight.

 

What is freedom in this house, anyway. Jin yanks the hair-band off and shakes the bob free, shouldering the door open. She’s learnt not to frown at its customary groan, because she realised it’s likely the nicest welcome she gets in this entire country.

 

While thanking the door for its hospitality, Jin doesn’t look at the body in the corner because nothing important shows up on a Tuesday. Especially not bedraggled teenagers with raindrops still cradling their faces, who wear shirts that bear the uncomfortable resemblance to muslin curtains, the creamy kind you find in a kinder bedroom. The northern lights are still firing up her synapses, but Jin knows what she wants, and that scene doesn’t take place in the leaking bitter light that follows all one-night-stands. So she doesn’t say anything.

 

But no one said a distraction couldn’t work; so she wipes the damp on her neck and arms before she offers the dry end of the towel to the slumped figure.

 

“No thanks. I got dirt all over me.” A limp hand disentangles itself from the mess of limbs and waves the proffered sheet away. At first glance, the slowly-bobbing hand could pass for a pale tsunami buoy, but with a start Jin recognises bandages. They’re the paper towel kind you find in hospitals, meant to be disposed at some point but made for disappointment.

 

“Tell me about it. We’re fine as long as you didn’t trek anything else in.”

 

“Cat tracks?”

 

“That’s suspicious.”

 

“Is it? I wouldn’t know, I’m new.” The stranger stretches and drags themself to their feet, which is a feat, considering how much there is to unwind. A lot of things well up in the diaphragm-knot under Jin’s throat; if she knows anything about living on an island, this is how most tidal storms start.

 

“Then we’d best keep you locked up here.” The sentence sounds wrong even before her lungs jam. Jin thinks without looking anywhere about how many seniors there are in this one school, and how none of them have right hands that look like adulthood, fastened by loopy signature dressing.

 

The music room is cosy, but it borders on claustrophobic on their end, which is how most families fall apart. At least strangers can still retreat to opposite sides without preparing for battle.

 

Jin would prefer radio silence, but there’s no radio here, so there’s just silence until she can pull herself out of her head like it’s the edge of the pool where gravity tells you to get dunked on, then sneak-attacks your ankles to haul you back down.

 

“You’ve got a nice room,” the stranger says, and leaves.

 

The Law Of Tuesdays dictates an unbelievable day; Jin might just believe in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this is the trashcan @thousandfolds on instagram &, like nowhere else. i woke up one (1) morning & decided i actually cared enough about my land of birth enough to let it break my heart so i wrote this. i wasn't supposed to touch any form of writing until like after the end-of-year graduating tests but then like ao3 sent the account confirmation email Early & all control just Vanished Into Plain Air.... also i'd like to quickly do a disclaimer & say that i don't know what hearing aids feel like so here's me projecting onto the main character. anyway we'll see how right i am & where this takes us. til next time


	2. different ways to kiss grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Admittedly it’s a nice song. But that doesn’t mean Jin wants to hum it, or share a memory, no matter how little it seems. It’s an admission of yesterday before classical music, yesterday when the doors were swinging shut, yesterday autoplay lofi chillhop and beauty not meant for the likes of her. If Jin lets this one go, then the rest of the house should deconstruct too.

It was a Tuesday when Jin began hoping for more than a good ending.

 

To be frank, she thought she could believe in a happy ending; looking back, it’s more than a little comically sad, but the future looked so far away so she thought she could wait.

 

Jin knows this: that you can’t wait for things anymore. Earlier in math, she’d let herself imagine the impossibility of the borealis tangle, hiking up the graph, and the result made its way onto the cube-printed paper. It was pretty, but wrong, which is an observation Jin can apply to a lot of things. Even if it wasn’t, the classroom always drains away the gentlest of us; so rough-around-the-edges Jin, thoughts-like-monsoon-wind Jin, has learnt that she can never pack her bag fast enough with people around.

 

Now she thinks that if she can’t have a happy ending, or even a good one, then she should be allowed an ending. Jin may crave the undrawn parts of maps, but in the end, everyone’s favourite part of the day is the embrace of a warm home. No one wants anything less, unless it’s no home at all.

 

This is the thing she finds on her tongue as soon as she steps back into the music room on Wednesday, and traces the familiar slumping shoulders. She’s pretty sure she wants to talk through the night with this stranger, or never see them again. The problem is, she’s got nothing on the social skills department, and she thinks she messed up even before the first save point.

 

Mutely, she sets her things down. And still, and still. The humming undercurrent in her ear waits for someone to say something.

 

Admittedly it could be worse. It didn’t rain today, so at least the drafts aren’t too cold. The air in these parts tastes like it was around to kiss Raffles’ boots but Jin lets in fresh blood occasionally, so the signal is a couple centuries younger. Sometimes the jam of the day goes from the latest hits to xinyao but there’s a romantic in every historian so she knows how to sing along, not without pretending she doesn’t hear her mother’s voice in a transient guitar.

 

Jin knows she has to make the first move, but the only introductions she knows are how to give are offering paper towels and taking her viola out of the case.

 

So she does the latter. There’s a shiver that runs along the paint-peels, then the room quietly suggests a very old tune.

 

Admittedly it’s a nice song. But that doesn’t mean Jin wants to hum it, or share a memory, no matter how little it seems. It’s an admission of yesterday before classical music, yesterday when the doors were swinging shut, yesterday autoplay lofi chillhop and beauty not meant for the likes of her. If Jin lets this one go, then the rest of the house should deconstruct too.

 

But then her voice cracks so she knows she’s humming, and it’s not skylights in the basement, but a swinging gate following the lonely lion, or tiger. That’s how she knows, because stretching from under the distance is another solitary solo, another cracking voice.

 

At that moment Jin can maybe figure out why someone would run away, but she tucks that sheaf of rice-paper-fragile understanding in her left breast pocket in favour of staying. The loneliness is very close, but once she took apart a heart in biology (she didn’t ask whose) and saw how two bouts of loneliness could make a room smaller, but still forgiving enough for claustrophobes.

 

She likes history more, but she won’t deny that backstories can be beating hearts, can be pretty rivers. She keeps this in mind, even as the matter still remains that there’s a stranger across the room who knows her favourite song like all fictional miracles do, and that waving still from joint to knuckle are white flags that don’t mean surrender but look like they would apologise anyway.

 

That’s how the song finishes.

 

It’s back to radio silence then, even as Jin presses herself to the wall and brings up more around her, tries to fashion a question, thumbtack-sharp.

 

“I hear the proboscis monkeys are plucking leaves from the trees.” The stranger strikes out before she can. “And that the mousedeer patrol the Night Safari borders.”

 

The hearing aid didn’t register any white noise when she stepped in, but right then the room takes a deep breath, and stoppers up the door like it hasn’t heard a conversation for decades and wants to keep this one in the closest pocket. Jin knows enough about sound to know that this is her four-cornered world telling her to pay attention; so she looks up.

 

“Oh?”

 

She’s still holding her viola, but her hands still feel like grasping at straws so she fishes out her phone and googles Singapore Zoo. She doesn’t mean to fact-check, it’s just that everything about this looks like cotton in her lungs. And she sounds just like she feels, which is just woken up.

 

“…And do the otters never come up for air?”

 

“They don’t need to. They’ve got waterproofed dens.”

 

“It’s still odd.”

 

“Not as bad as missing animals, right?”

 

“Still worse than missing persons,” Jin asserts.

 

This time she is certain she didn’t say it wrong, but the knob behind her ear begins to crackle, and continues to do so until the door swings shut.

 

Oh, says no one in particular. Oh.

 

**

 

The TV is on when she gets back, which is a surprise.

 

“How was your day? Dinner’s in the back.” Someone might have smiled here, but Jin doesn’t know, so she retreats to behind the kitchen counter.

 

“Someone in the church network messaged our group chat a link to this documentary. It’s about climate change and rising sea levels. Since I finished my work early, do you want to watch it while eating together?”

 

She’d be too busy thinking about monkeys and mousedeer to pay attention anyway, so Jin grabs her plate and even bothers to connect her hearing aid to the TV.

 

Not even ten minutes into the documentary, her airway cuts her off. Coughing, she looks up in time to see the figure of a very familiar bearded man.

 

“If He can cause a global forty day flood, then He can save you from―”

 

Jin leaves her appetite right there, sitting beside her mother on the couch. She doesn’t need to switch anything off, she’s not even listening.

 

**

 

The more Jin thinks about it, the more she suspects Singapore is washing away to the east.

 

She argues with herself on the last evening train home. It’s not washing away to the east so much as going back to the South China Sea, or retracing the steps of the last journey westward; she knows turtles return to lay their eggs at the beach they were born, which means all these wandering coasts do know where to go, so Singapore and her weary transport systems do belong somewhere.

 

There’s pollen on the wind, and a timelapse of sunflowers springs up the windows again. The mix of lamplight and dusk filters in through the petals, and inside the cabin, it feels like gold dust. Jin knows very well the old East-West argument and the politics of immigration, but the one she thinks about most, and the one not even history teachers will mention, is the idea of Singapore as the illegitimate lovechild who cannot identify with anything at all.

 

This is the same old story except in microcosms, in quieter lakes but no less sad than an ocean of fractured islands. This is that timeless song on repeat for two years running that sounds like it was released yesterday, or a couple of centuries ago.

 

As a tiring workforce tries to diagnose what’s wrong with the heartsick trains, Jin thinks the rest of us find different ways to kiss grief. Some of us pucker our lips so the salt only brushes our mouths. Some of us launch into the deep end and say we are called to the light ― because apparently, there is someone else. Between the first time you crack an egg to the last Monday you can shoulder on the world without anyone letting go, there has to be someone else.

 

Apparently sometimes these two kinds of people find each other, then resolve to leave something better for the next part, even if one is scared to touch and the other is bearing on blindly.

 

Jin rubs her nose and grabs onto the straps of her instrument case. But no one ever asks if they got it all wrong, she thinks fiercely. No one wants to know whether they left eggshell bits of themselves all over the welcome mat because they loved too hard, or if they never loved at all.

 

Outside, the leaves are falling. Outside, loneliness roams the street.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alright like hell idk what i'm doing. we just finished grad tests so maybe i'll do more word vomit here too, but like?? maybe i'll work on that merchant of venice fic. we'll see when i wake up fully from my nap


	3. a slow transmission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s never seen such softness in equatorial daylight before, even among the system errors, among the gold dust.
> 
> “It’s always cold nowadays,” she finally replies, flattening her palm on the side of the room.

“If you run away again, I’ll come after you.”

 

Jin’s not taking any chances here. The last time she did that, everyone got away and all she had left was a bit of static, a pocketful of song.

 

The stranger waves her suggestion away.

 

“In which case I won’t.”

 

What Jin means when she says she has Defiance Of Authority is that she has problems trusting people who promise they can make the problems go away. Every time she lets someone else take the wheel, the car always fills to the brim with everything but oxygen, so she makes sure she has something to believe in between autoplay and debate, and that is all.

 

Years of habit means she’s got all the symptoms down, knows the shutter-stop of the heart that happens exactly when someone gets under the wall of noise. Here are all the signs: when someone claims they won’t upend your life, they will only make a sadder storm, not a smaller one. Jin, like everybody else, does not want strangers who can talk you through the night so fast that all that’s left of your dance is a messy viola score, strewn all over the dregs of the school.

 

And still. And still.

 

“Alright,” she says.

 

“You’re not giving me a chance,” they say, looking up at her. “I’m just a newcomer. Just passing by.”

 

This, Jin recognises, is a save point. She knows it well enough by now, and she has a response ready for when the tide comes in. “Not in Singapore you’re not.”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“What are the monkeys doing? And the mousedeer?”

 

“Wouldn’t I like to know.” Their face has turned back to the wall, so she takes a second to piece the sounds together, but anyone can hear satisfaction like victory, like ocean-deep bruises. She narrows her eyes.

 

“…The monkeys are plucking leaves, and they’re keeping track of who they give them to. If you watch, you’ll see them go up to each other and inspect the leaves in their fur. The mousedeer are trying to guard everyone, even if moving around as a herd makes it easier to for bulk abduction.”

 

“So… What does that make you?”

 

Jin knows it’s dangerous to ask lonely things what they are, because you’d be backing them into a corner, and that’s when the pins start to hurt, and she’s not yet part of ACRES or any animal welfare group to know how to make them stay. That’s the thing with these wild creatures, coming in fresh from the shore. Jin’s honestly tired of walkouts by now, but she prepares for another anyway.

 

“I don’t know.” The stranger fiddles with the ragged hem of the bandages, twists it until the threads spring free.

 

The admission is as good as any cue, because Jin knows she has to wait this time, because there is more if she counts away enough heartbeat-measures like gasping koi.

 

“Kome, I guess. That makes me Kome.”

 

It’s… It’s not the response she expects.

 

She lets go of the doorknob and steps in, putting her case on the floor. “It makes you Kome the stranger.”

 

“You know my name, that’s enough. I’m not hanging around long.”

 

“Then you might as well come with me.” Jin trails her fingers down the water’s edge, and snags her finger on a ghostly fin. It doesn’t mean she can make something out of this, but it doesn’t mean miracles can’t come true, either. Without waiting for a response, she walks out of the door, ready to follow, or stay.

 

“It’s cold today,” Kome says, closing the door behind them. The wind picks up again and more glossy leaves fall.

 

Out of the corner of her eye, Jin glimpses the bandages unravelling. With every gust, even the music room seems to fold outwards, creaking each joint before rustily padding outside. Each step of the way, the paint-peels ruffle as they wonder if they should stay or go; until there are three transient blooms, watching all sorts of things come to light.

 

It’s like watching a heart, undressing itself on the bedroom floor. The peculiar unguardedness of animals at the end of the day, all things from tiger to mousedeer drawing their loopy circles before they kiss the moon goodnight. She’s never seen such softness in equatorial daylight before, even among the system errors, among the gold dust.

 

“It’s always cold nowadays,” she finally replies, flattening her palm on the side of the room.

 

Kome catches her gaze on the bandages, which all three of them recognise is the end of the map; so while they put the rest of the charted waters away, the room goes back to curl up in its corner. This time around, they’re more careful -― Kome does leave, but they’re slower about it. Jin watches the back of their fingers knot together fishtail ends of the gauze and makes to follow, but the wind lets her down very gently, says to let them go, let them go.

 

**

 

At the second bell toll earlier, Jin only managed to grab her viola before she sprinted to the music room. From the 3ᶮᵈ storey classroom, the clouds could be mangosteens; occasionally, she spies little chafings where the shell has flaked off. There’s temptation under what’s left of her fingernails to find a coin in her wallet and scratch it all to light.

 

The classroom is unbearably empty when she goes back to collect her bag, but that’s because she wasn’t looking properly. Caught on the edge of a deep blue table is a slip of paper, and doodled on it is a shining mess of lines. Jin can feel those knots catch under her throat like hiccups once she realises whose table it is.

 

No one says in her ear: if she reaches out to touch, there will be no need for music tonight. Nobody at all.

 

See, Jin has always known faraway gorgeous things, and the way she hears the conch breeze in the middle of the island means this doesn’t have to be one of them. There is no need for her to keep all her midnight philosophising behind the windowpanes, not when she can have company until dawn.

 

She steps up to the table, wiping her hands down on her pinafore. It’s the blanker side of the graph paper, ordinary if not for the bare bones of a scene: a carbon copy of the classroom she is standing in, just filled with the rough underwater flights of koi and tigers and otters; all sorts of submerged, all sorts of beautiful.

 

This can mean so many things; Jin can’t look away. When she squints, it looks like a wondrous net, trailing comet-tails in her vision as she blinks and blinks the water out of her eyes, all the ripples ruffling over her head as she drowns in the shallows, as she slips away with everyone else while her bag packs itself and the chairs and tables reverse positions. A shaky finger traces the faded squares.

 

She’s got a choice here. Lungs filling with fawn-pink, Jin tucks the picture back under the table, but not without taking a picture.

 

Even as she hurries away with her bag, she knows she’s going to be kneeling among the pillows later, holding the phone over her heart.

 

This can be something to keep her company until dawn, and then she will kneel among her pillows when she lets go. Before the bitter light leaks in; before shadows lean against the door and twist the doorknob, so Jin tightens her fingers around the phone like she has something to pray for, like someone who’s not afraid of leaving eggshell bits while they wait for you to answer the door because they know they can.

 

The train home takes ages to come. When it does, Jin is already so light-eyed and so light-hearted she can barely squeeze herself in. The staff look at her like they suspect she’s hiding a balloon between her lungs, or smuggling stars.

 

**

 

Jin doesn’t dream that night, she really doesn’t.

 

Instead, she counts the beeps and bumps long into the night, while the city’s lightbugs make mockeries of her featherweight heart. Every blink could be Morse code at this point, a slow transmission from across the swimming pool.

 

That damn swimming pool. With a sigh, she rolls onto her back.

 

She briefly considered playing some music half an hour ago, but she didn’t want to go to sleep without diving into the deep end. At this rate, she’s going to do something stupid, like run into the thunderstorm outside so it can leave her strung up on the branches as it passes, and then the whole wide world will see the way she’s fractured up the river.

 

It’s a Thursday. Thursday is Tuesday 2.0, the best outcome out of the fourteen million bad endings, the past few days. There’s the answer to the question nobody asked, singing under the motors purring down the road. Someone knots the fishtail to stay a little longer; rusty leaves and flowers are settling for monsoon wind.

 

Compromise is the name of the game.

 

Jin lets her thoughts sweep her up, so in the wrinkles and folds of the covers she finds eddies without looking; briefly she is reminded of solitary beasts, tracing the rounds of their nest. Briefly she wonders how all the lost things in the world are doing, then she doesn’t.

 

She doesn’t dream, but the world has never looked this gorgeous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI back from the death & have finally decided to make this 15 chapters long. rather ambitious but sjksjkjsk haha yknow - all or nothing, that kind of desperation.  
> something interesting is that i've died @ poetry & have not been posting on ig since ages ago. like yeah i've got a pome in mind right now but, prose has taken over my brain for now. anyway i think i will write it out soon, stay (in) tune(d). just a lil musician pun for ya  
> i will post the first chapter of the merchant of venice fic soon so get ready for that too. have good day


	4. big enough for atlantis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So yes, the leaves are turning rust-red like real autumn, and the flowers are blooming too. This could be Singapore being pretentious, or it could be Singapore being real.

“I never said whether or not I spirited away your lions and tigers, I just hinted at the possibilities.”

 

“That’s pretty suspicious if you ask me.”

 

“You trust me.”

 

It’s not a question, not when Kome says it.

 

“Do I,” she deadpans.

 

This is their banter now: two sides sardonic, a sprinkle of curiosity, but mostly cautious. No one trusts themselves enough not to keep the bitter in check, so every sentence has at least two to five different meanings behind it; which is saying they’re asking questions under questions, getting at answers six feet deep. It reminds Jin of dancing around thumbtack labels except Kome doesn’t have the right hand, nor the will, to throw darts at her anyway. The worst that could happen here is that someone will touch someone else’s old bruise, but even then they’ll just agree to try again tomorrow.

 

She doesn’t have so much at risk, which is good, and there’s never any grainy buffering time needed when they aim. So this is an arrangement that can work.

 

This close, Jin has had more time to observe them. They’re tall, much taller than her 158 centimetres, and trip on their own shoes absurdly often. Their hair always looks damp, and on the rare occasions they step outside the music room, a glint of something will wink at her from behind their ear and remind her of the morse message, and the swimming pool. She wonders if Kome swims.

 

But most of the time, they just sit and talk, occasionally falling silent when the music room groans something in reply, and someone’s refrain can be heard on the draft. When this happens, Kome’s snub of a nose twitches, as it does whenever they smile.

 

Kome is the kind of murky, morally-ambiguous character Jin sees in Young Adult fiction tropes, but actually done well. Quicksilver smiles and injuries of dubious origins? Yes, but it doesn’t account for the stealth with which they steer topics away from themself, and to the Zoo; who says we can’t be suckers for well-developed characters.

 

“Have you heard much from the zoo lately?”

 

“No,” she says, but she guesses it’s because the government don’t want people to be worried. “Have you?”

 

“A couple things,” they reply conversationally, tightening the ends of the rope. “For starters, I’ve heard it’s been getting rather cold lately.”

 

This is definitely not a newsflash. The impromptu autumn Singapore has been adopting the past few weeks has evolved into a real leaf-shedding event, complete with windbreaker sales in every winter apparel store all over the country.

 

“Actually, I might get a jacket at the rate prices keep dropping; and it’s Friday anyway, so we can make it a day. You in?”

 

They narrow their eyes and continue regardless, but she can tell they’re considering it. “Do they have heaters in the zoo?”

 

“…It might depend on the animal, but since it’s supposed to be tropical here, I’d expect it’s more air-conditioning than anything else. Why?”

 

“Don’t you think they’ll be cold?”

 

“I guess. Do you have any solutions, though?” She finishes dumping all her work into her bag and stands, offering a hand to Kome.

 

They relent, unfolding their curled-up position between the walls and accepting her offer. “No, not really.”

 

Jin scrutinises the expression on their face but sees nothing there, so she turns around to lead, but not before she sees the flash of blue, then a green afterimage.

 

**

 

To be honest, this seasonal thing could be romantic. It means jackets and warm drinks, no sweat, and pretty sunsets.

 

The only thing that really changes in Jin’s life is that from Monday onwards, she keeps hearing “apple-cheeked” in the ‘model compositions’ of her class, which would be disappointingly basic if she bothered to listen.

 

It’s true that she shuns conventions, but the warning signs start to appear when in her own writing, she starts describing characters with bandaged hands and wrists falling off and trust issues, coming from nowhere but with a smile that could be big enough to promise Atlantis. It gets her called up once by the teacher after school but the matter resolves itself quickly and she’s not more than five minutes late to the music room because it’s not her blood on the floor. When prompted she deadpans “red food colouring”, but she thinks about the matter enough that she buys Kome a new roll of bandages for the last time she looked too long.

 

They look less pale nowadays, so maybe she didn’t need to, but she thinks they both breathe easier when there are more physical layers than conversational. Still, she maybe misses the first steps into the pool, probing toes, not knowing all the questions she can’t ask anymore.

 

So yes, the leaves are turning rust-red like real autumn, and the flowers are blooming too. This could be Singapore being pretentious, or it could be Singapore being real. The colour red isn’t Jin’s favourite but she learns to live with it, because there was a rose-bloom curling round the cheek of this rogue star once and down the back of its ear, but then things got better. She learnt to go on autoplay, so she could say when it stopped.

 

**

 

They venture out of the room the next day because Jin promised it’d be worth it.

 

“So now we have naked trees, but at least they’re pretty.”

 

“So you admit they’re pretty,” Jin points out, sitting cross-legged under a tree.

 

“So you admit they’re naked,” Kome retorts, lying down beside her and curling on their side. “I wonder if they feel cold, too.”

 

She wonders for a moment if she’s supposed to ask about the animals, but then Kome looks up at her, grinning lopsidedly.

 

“If I were an artist, I’d draw you surrounded by nude branches.”

 

“…Flattering.”

 

“That’s how it gets you.”

 

“That’s how what gets you?”

 

“I don’t know. The trees. The weather. The whole damn thing.”

 

“Are you angry about the zoo again?”

 

“…We should throw it all away. Anyway, there’s a peacock feather in your hair.”

 

She touches the back of her head self-consciously, but Kome smooths something achingly gentle back behind her ear and looks away, closing their eyes.

 

**

 

So as the country shows a couple more colours, Jin goes swimming again.

 

“It’s cold,” she gasps after finishing half her laps, still shivering the tangles out of her hair.

 

Examining the hearing aid she’d entrusted them with, Kome doesn’t look up, but grins anyway. “You’ll get used to it. It means there’s something there.”

 

Ominous, but it’s just a swimming pool. She dives back in.

 

Jin doesn’t really know why she even took the plunge. Maybe it’s an unconscious response to the net of stars, or the evening artwork. Maybe she’s in over her head. Whatever it is, this is more her depth than enclosed spaces filling away the oxygen, like classrooms, like cars; which means that there’s a height of two metres before she hits her head on the floor, and nothing else. It’s a realistic suspension of freefall. It’s believable.

 

So she goes into a box and tries not to drown for an hour every day. It sounds ridiculous, but not as much as the fact that the water is warmer than pretty much anything else in the country.

 

“How does it feel?” Kome asks, squatting beside her as she finishes a lap.

 

“Pretty warm, actually. You wouldn’t think it would be, but being here is kinder than being on land.”

 

“That means something too,” but Kome doesn’t say what. Jin dives back in to stop herself from asking.

 

The pool is almost cosy in its temperature, which means it’s hard getting people out of there. More often than once, she spies teachers on-duty hauling people out to free up space for others. That kind of desperation has to be comical; it would be, in another place.

 

**

 

Between school and the music room and the pool, Jin’s busier.

 

She tries to avoid the room furthest from the wifi router, that is to say the room with bad connection, or the one that always has static interference. That’s what she says, but really it’s because this whole house reminds her of a big comet crater, out in the middle of nowhere, newborn and lonely; it’s just that this corner in particular never allows transmissions through, so even the bravest of astronauts, signing their way through the fishbowl, never have anything to say. They’ve been flying at different frequencies since forever here.

 

It’s the quietest spot in the house, which makes sense because it took the most damage. From the fall, the place that went first and knocked its head the hardest was this one, then the rest of the body just followed suit.

 

It’s the quieter of the two still-lived-in rooms; not by much, but enough to hear her bedraggled steps padding down the hall. One evening, her mother calls in a waterlogged gait.

 

“How was school? I hope it was alright. I just came back from church early, and it was miraculous.” Jin’s bubbling her boredom in the fish bowl, but no one stops for air.

 

“While Father was giving the homily, it was storming horrifically, thunder booming and all. Then there was a flash of lightning, and the lights went out, but guess what? There was still light coming in from the stained window, and it was this beautiful colour because the pink cloth baby Jesus was swaddled in was glowing!”

 

Jin remembers baby Jesus briefly from catechism, and honestly found him cuter than any other rendition of Jesus.

 

“Then we were sitting in the dark, and I was bathed in the most holy…” Here Jin shuts off, until she’s done expositioning, “And the parish priest came out and said he called the bishop in! I’m going there tomorrow when he comes, so don’t stay up for me.”

 

To be fair, Jin hardly used to, and now, she never even thinks about trying to wait for her mother, so she just nods and leaves.

 

This whole thing is sad, she thinks, walking back to her room. The trees are sad. All the unravelling bandages are sad and no one wants to see the aftermath. The whole reason why this is happening is because someone’s just sad, and not because someone’s regretful, or wants to do by anything right; all she knows is that this is mostly pretentious, and that kind of crisp jacket-wearing novelty wears off on people.

 

So we’re all shedding leaves and layers. So Jin really wants to put something back together, because it’s not like the monkeys will.


	5. if not in our stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “…If you did that in front of her, then I have a moral obligation to call you stupid.”
> 
> “Lovesick is better,” she points out, sitting up and reaching for her viola. “And I think I know a song about that. It might even be old enough for you to know.”
> 
> Kome laughs and laughs.

She bruises more easily than planned, Jin thinks, nursing an aching shin and two black eyes as she makes her slow way to the music room.

 

“The class went diving,” she announces to the whole of the music room, and an unimpressed Kome.

 

“You look like you went diving into the panda enclosure,” they remark, poking around her leg. “What’s with the dark circles?”

 

She kicks out threateningly. “I made my goggles tighter because they kept slipping off.”

 

Kome calls her stupid. Jin calls them nothing for a whole of two very long days and goes straight to the pool, resolutely walking past the music room every time; but it only lasts until they step into the changing rooms after she’s done her late afternoon laps. In one hand is the hearing aid; the other clenches a fistful of crimson.

 

She fixes on the aid before taking the crumpled (but still brilliant) leaves, and exchanges them for some new dressing in her bag. Closing her eyes, Jin unwinds the old white flags, changes the colour of surrender to pale shark-tooth.

 

(These are not white flags, these are not peace offerings. She has to chant it over in her mind as she carefully extracts the autumn-rusted leaves; because she knows if she doesn’t remind herself, she’ll forget the raw and the blooming, the inside of the whale’s mouth.)

 

**

 

Jin follows them to the music room, which sighs its welcome longer than usual and even closes the door for them. They don’t try to go back to that save point, which she’s grateful for, so she just leans against the wall and opts to describe the swimming lesson, instead of the two-day blank slate, still paint-fresh in the corners

 

Originally she signed up for the intermediate session in a bid to hide away in the indoor pool, but they moved her up to advanced anyway, which meant she froze up and caught herself in pearl-pink net mesh instead of actually doing laps, which was embarrassing, especially when the swim group went deep-sea-diving off the coast. That’s what it felt like, anyway, when the clams open wide as you doggy-paddle past.

 

“Is that where you hurt your leg?”

 

Jin’s heart makes a fist. She thinks for a moment about whether or not it hurts, but decides that bruises will fade anyway.

 

“Yes, I, uh, I dove off the platform but one leg flopped at the last minute, which meant I faceplanted into the water and shot myself in the shin.”

 

“…If you did that in front of her, then I have a moral obligation to call you stupid.”

 

“Lovesick is better,” she points out, sitting up and reaching for her viola. “And I think I know a song about that. It might even be old enough for you to know.”

 

Kome laughs and laughs.

 

**

 

The house is empty as usual, but she remembers when its inhabitants started not coming home, either because they didn’t live there anymore or they tried to stay away. Either way, it was because they didn’t think this was home, which makes sense, which Jin can understand.

 

She shuts the front door. Earlier on the train, all the students left before she did, while in return the sun and its flowers came back to life. The cabin was briefly gleaming, if not for cleanliness but more so because of the gilt in the river. Jin pretended that the train was a boat, and every rock and bump was just an unknown river-dweller, pushing it along with gentle goodwill. Even so, she didn’t try putting her hand in the water.

 

As Jin and the boat made their slow way to the old underwater kingdom, the people drifted out and began to go back where they came from, in waves at first, then smaller-scale disasters. Every time someone left, the journey went faster, until the vessel had enough speed on it to dive all the way down.

 

She thought about what awaited her. An empty house with shuttered eyes and nothing living in the living room, just the fading imprints of a couple of warm ghosts. Even they didn’t stay too long, and even they didn’t step into the room where Jin hears her heartbeat in terms of sound and static.

 

It’s the quietest spot in the house, which makes sense because it took the most damage. This means the other half-lived-in room is louder, which, to be honest, should also mean that the most painful crash-landing in the history of empty nests happened to this one with her bed in it, the last door before the living room.

 

She remembers it like a timeless song with no pitch, just beat after beat of a sad story, which comes in waves and never stops rocking. She was younger. As her cubicle braced for landing, the shockwaves rippled their way up the tilting hall and set off the sirens; it was too late, but that didn’t make them any less loud. Her ears hurt. People kept talking over the intercoms and trying to get in contact but there wasn’t much to begin making contact with, because Jin was too shocked to tell them anything, she just floated in antigravity and cried upwards. She knows this because the ceiling still bears faint watermarks.

 

She’s the last one on the train, but even the concept of space in a train ceases to exist so it also means she’s the last one to leave. The doors sigh a reply as they slide shut.

 

Jin doesn’t have anywhere to go that doesn’t sting, so she opts for the lesser pain.

 

Her mother’s room looks better than the day gravity switched off; things are bound together in neat files and organised, which means that even if they float off, they float off together. Binders are more useful than promise rings, for good reason. There are no promise rings in this house.

 

The only thing connected to the floor is the computer because the wires never let it. Jin doesn’t sit in the chair because she doesn’t trust it to hold her lightweight heart and not drift away while she tries to find something else that survived the fallout, but stands while she powers it on.

 

The computer is pretty ancient and even then it still tries to lift off, which says a lot about what it has undergone, but uprooting wasn’t fatal so staying shouldn’t be either. Ignoring the rusty beeps, she keys in the coordinates of the bad secret and clicks Login; she tries not to be surprised when it does.

 

Here is where things get messier. The local drives means the memory sticks around, which also means there’s navigational skills needed to wade through the waist-high mess. Moving around feels more dubious than the bottom of a swamp, but it’s not like there’s been life around here for a while so everything should stay at the bottom.

 

Eventually, she finds a folder where things still look organised, and it’s stashed away in the corner of the screen, moved alongside Trash but not quite in there yet. She clicks and comes face to face with herself.

 

This is a Jin before bluetooth, it dawns on her. This is a Jin before there was night, so before there was dawn, and everything was bright morning glory and bridges lined with bougainvillea.

 

Everything seems to be sorted by dates, but looks are deceiving so she has a right to be hesitant- cautious, when things could come to life at any time.

 

But it’s just baby pictures. Albums upon albums upon entire gigabytes of pictures, waiting to see something other than the light of the moon.

 

This is just under the album called ‘Jin’, though. When she clicks out, there’s still ‘jin w cousins’, ‘jin w grandparents’, then there’s ‘Lee Family’.

 

Jin slams the monitor down and holds the power off button for a long minute. Then she retreats to the living room, where she eats her dinner and waits for nobody to come home.

 

**

 

This time, she doesn’t talk for well over two days.

 

She’s got nothing to talk about. She’s glassy-eyed in class and all her laps are mechanical. She gets the hang of diving and always lines up in the middle so she blends in. There’s never not any white noise nowadays, even underwater with no hearing aid.

 

She does give Kome credit for trying, though. They keep silent the first day, greet her when she comes and leaves on the second, and joke around on the third, making even the room sag inwards and out with amused breaths.

 

“Cat got your tongue?”

 

Then there’s the weekend, and on the fourth it’s back to silence.

 

On the fifth, there’s just a murmuring brook in the dust, which runs itself through at least twice but never ceases its humming, filling up the comet craters. Suddenly, Jin bizarrely mistakes them for a radio, the streak of oilspill picking up everything around them.

 

“How’s the zoo?”

 

Kome starts, but doesn’t stop.

 

“You- I- Well, the keepers were kind of worried that the herbivorous animals would run out of leaves, but apparently the crunchy red ones are still good enough so they left it there. They do get leaner meat for the carnivores but it’s still the same price so that resolved itself too, especially when someone set a herd of goats free in the Night Safari, which was unexpected but not too bad in the end. Um, and someone’s installed heaters―”

 

“―Where in Singapore do you get those?”

 

Kome does pause, and fidgeting with the hearing aid they insist on holding onto until she goes home; they hazard: “Don’t you ship in goods?”

 

“The zoo didn’t pay?”

 

“They, they just showed up. The keepers went in one morning and found the entire system running. Maybe the monkeys have something to do with it, since they’re not busy plucking leaves anymore. Those things just keep falling and then growing again. It’s got to end somewhere, though.”

 

“That’s pretty ominous.”

 

“I pride myself on many things; mastery of good foreshadowing is one of them.”

 

Jin frowns at the ceiling. “You might as well predict my future for me.”

 

“I know you’ll see me next week. That’s definitely in the stars.” Kome shakes sleep out of their limbs like a wet dog, and with it go all the soft corners. Silhouettes don’t have faces, which is probably why Jin can’t lip-read the goodbye they cradle like the banks of the river. “‘s probably not like you believe in much, though, just…” They struggle for words, but eventually settle. “Don’t be a stranger.”

 

Jin doesn’t look when Kome steps out of the door, but she does listen. This is a Tuesday, so the day has been dull since she had nothing going for it, not until it took a sharp skydiving turn. She thinks allowances can be made for Tuesdays that look ordinary but aren’t really, ones that start out as another day in denial but end in people assigning themselves to uninhabited pedestals down the hall.

 

This part begins on the radio like all songs must begin, but it doesn’t have to end there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahahahahah ok i just got back from holiday & everything's hectic because my fingers have Forgotten how to play the viola after not touching it for like. a week. anyway i die. also kind of worried because i haven't started on chapter 8 but hopefully jin and kome know where to take it from here


	6. an older fallout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Together, they trace the craters gentler; as if the moon were a drawing and the borealis-beautiful silver had been erased off the map, and all anyone had left is the memory of fallout.
> 
> “Would you want to lose this?”
> 
> Jin thinks about yesterday night, and doesn’t know if she does.

The mid-autumn festival is a big family gathering, or at least it would be if someone hung back from the road.

 

On another day, Jin wouldn’t be bothered, but celebrations bring out the strangest in people; for example, today she is sentimental Jin, who only comes out when incense takes to the air like dust and bears on blindly for the next week of festivities, at least until the gentlest parts of her half-and-half heart stops holding close to faith. The last few nights, she’d been hearing a rumbling voice speak dialect from the other end of the bed, and she thinks she could learn to understand, because it has the same rhythm as the same old song every halfer knows. The mirage riding the last of the departing sea.

 

Even if she doesn’t believe in the lady on the moon, she looks for her anyway. What this means is that since Jin can’t see anything but the next block from the high-rise, she just spends the night at the balcony, looking through windows that don’t have eggshell cracks in them; while circling underneath like moths are hearts as wide as the world, touching shoulder to shoulder.

 

Altogether, it’s not too bad. This year, her mother makes an exception, buying mooncakes for them to eat while they pretend the ceiling light is the moon, like instead of electricity there is a skylight that houses what would otherwise be blocked out by the next apartment over. It’s pretentious old play but if Jin takes on her role as the dissociating, disappointed daughter, then she can learn to appreciate the intricacies of a scene, the way the relationship plays out in the grander scheme of things.

 

Jin has three quarters of a mooncake before she decides that yolk separate from the filling tastes too much like something older than this. Still, she finds herself inches away from licking her fingers for the rest of the night, forgetting all about the letting go, as if forgiving the hit on the head.

 

**

 

This time, Kome’s the one to drag her out, the room trailing behind. It’s a little cloudy, but last night still lingers over their heads.

 

Together, they trace the craters gentler; as if the moon were a drawing and the borealis-beautiful silver had been erased off the map, and all anyone had left is the memory of fallout.

 

“Would you want to lose this?”

 

Jin thinks about yesterday night, and doesn’t know if she does. Her room, which she has always defined as nothing more than the world coming to an end in one living quarter, is mostly nothing but the space shuttle coming home the wrong way. If she lets it go of that, the last astronaut will drift right out. The question here, if she has the numbers down right, is whether or not she can live with herself.

 

“The room would be too big,” she says after a while.

 

Kome doesn’t move for such a long time that she thinks they’ve forgotten to answer, but their eyes flick up to meet hers like deep-sea dawning, the peculiar shine as whales breach the surface. They’re reminding her of waiting, just the way she learnt it ― coming back every afternoon to coax the lonely things out of their corners of the room; with brine in the corner of all the sad mouths. So Jin runs her finger along the dorsal fins above the water patiently.

 

In the end she doesn’t wait for much, because all Kome says is this:

 

“There’s no room for the moon here. There’s no room for much anything at all.”

 

**

 

Turns out Kome is wrong.

 

The moon’s always out from that day onwards, as in twenty-four hour convenience store ever-presence, in that same way all the leaves in this place used to look like glossy tropical secrets. Jin notices this in the back of her mind, but it doesn’t register until even she realises that the girl now looks somehow brighter in math; and it’s not like anyone’s on autoplay again. Jin watches helplessly, making fervent wishes as star after shooting star scatters down the rounds of those rising shoulders, those falling shoulders.

 

Tides are changing. The thing that hurts now isn’t the timezone tripping over itself to touch base with all the celestial bodies; it’s distance slipping itself closer, taking every relentless step like Jin’s a stray, backed into the bad corner of town. Nowadays, there are more occasions when her heart binds itself into a fist, arteries clenching; mostly, she still feels like she’s stolen a star.

 

But still, but still. The fishing hook snagged under the band of her ponytail coils against her head in worry.

 

See, Kome speaks like the next person, just a touch more omniscient, a shower of unknowns dredged from the bottom of the lake. For most part, she trusts them and all their bad secrets, just like she trusts herself not to let her own static in; but they’re not mistaken about things very often, either. It’s just that she’s accepted that the lonely heart, the one that knows everyone’s favourite songs and sings it back to them, is invincible, and forgot that the more days someone sees, the faster they lose track. There are still paint-peels from where they have been through enough walkouts to know what fallout feels like, that kind of slow-motion free-fall through high tide.

 

Whatever it is, everyone is taken aback by the new foreverness of the moon; Jin just takes it as the next end of the world, and worries about smaller breakdowns. The thought in itself is pretty ominous, but from the looks of the clouds gathering over the baring raintrees, the end might even be gentle. So that’s all she prays for.

 

**

 

The symptoms of a broken sewage system go like this: brimming drains and sounds of rushing water following you, no matter where you go. If there were any warning systems for these kind of things, they would be ringing themselves to the end by now. Since Singapore has only ever known civil disasters, the only bells she has to lose are fire alarms, which paradoxically increase in volume as the water inches higher.

 

This is how people know the tide has stopped receding. It is one sign of many, like how suddenly everybody is a waking dream in motion, swinging through the cosmic chaos on a dizzyingly slow merry-go-round. No one’s found the lunar lady yet, but they’re still looking. Once, Jin realised she didn’t need to look for anything when the classroom had a moon of its own; she stopped waiting at the balcony, but she didn’t stop holding close, keeping the faith.

 

**

 

The symptoms of a broken heart go like this: brimming eyes and sounds of rushing water following you, no matter where in the house you are.

 

**

 

The first time the tide set off the fire alarms, it was Tuesday afternoon, and everyone thought it was the school bell. Jin readies herself for the onslaught of newly-freed students, but that never comes.

 

That’s the fire bell, someone yells; so there’s the water and all its strange creatures coming in, she thinks bitterly, her heart tripping over its feet when the girl brushes past her instrument case. Before she can think about the no-baggage rule during emergency evacuations, she holds it tight and rides the rising waves.

 

When the sea departs, it leaves her standing in front of the music room, the rapids spitting her out onto the banks. Standing, she shakes off the droplets, and steps in.

 

Kome’s sitting in the middle of the disaster, right in the eye of the gentlest hurricane Jin has ever seen. There are glossy lily pads in the pools around them, heartbreak soaking into the cracks on the wall and curling in the crevices; everything is soaked and heavy and the air weighs in her lungs. A long silence follows like a prelude waiting to happen, except for faraway rushes of water; and it hurts no matter how she listens.

 

“What happened, Kome?” Jin breathes from the door, not daring to step in. “How?”

 

Kome shakes their head, tucking themselves inwards, knees drawing under their chin. The telltale symptoms are showing because she can’t hear a refrain echoing off the wall, no undercurrent suggesting what to do so she doesn’t know what to say.

 

“It flooded, just like that,” they murmur, the dulcet trembling, and here was Jin all along, believing this stranger knew anything about swimming.

 

Mutely, she grasps at gauze-knots. Jin brings them to standing but she doesn’t know what else to do, other than try not to go back to many yesterdays ago, where they put themselves away, still aching at the fingers; at the same time, she wants to wrench off the bandages and leave the dressing floating in an empty pool. At that moment, she can maybe figure out why someone would leave their heart behind, but she doesn’t try to squeeze their hand.

 

Yes, two bouts of loneliness could make a room smaller, but Jin thinks the walls cannot contain them anymore. The both of them will bob away with the rest of the pale tsunami buoys and that will be the end of the story; and it might as well be, seeing as It’s the end of the day; so Jin lets them stay until the water until their knees make floodlines, then she tugs twice and wades out with Kome in tow.

 

“I… should’ve been there earlier, and I should have stayed.” The wet spikes of their hair ruffle in the coastal breeze, making bobbing motions like apology, like agreement.

 

Admittedly, it could be worse, but it aches between her lungs when the door swings shut without protest. Still, Jin takes comfort in the fact that she didn’t see anyone slip away, so she can doubt. Watching the over-running school, she holds on to whatever she has left; her hand coming to rest on a bleeding crack, which wells up under her palm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alright MAN life has been hectic because i’ve just realised i have four (4) concerts & one (1) touring orchestra trip coming for me & my terrified soul so gotta Practise. honestly like crap i didn’t sign up for this lmao, but anyway i’ve got a lil break to post so sorry for dying here lmao. enjoy this Sad Thing & have good day


End file.
